Prague, 30 September 2010 – According to a survey conducted for CZ.NIC by the Markent agency, e-mails written in Czech without the language-specific diacritic marks are becoming increasingly rare. This is particularly true for communication using work mail accounts. While diacritics were not used in the work e-mails of a full quarter of survey respondents in 2008, the figure dropped to only 14 percent this year. The number of people not using diacritics also decreased among users of personal e-mail accounts, where the habit of writing messages in a simplified way had taken much stronger root. In 2008, 45 percent of users fell into this category; this year, the figure is only 29 percent.

A typical user who does not use diacritics in e-mail communication is between the age of 30 and 39 years and lives in a municipality of 100,000 inhabitants or more. Most of those users live in Prague and in west and north Bohemia.

“The fears that electronic communication will have a noticeable impact on written language have been proven unjustified. Not using diacritics in electronic communication was only a temporary trend caused by the technical limitations of the early days of the internet which have been gradually overcome. The results of the survey pertaining to organisations in particular show that using diacritics in e-mail communication is one of the basic characteristics of Czech electronic language culture,” says Ondřej Filip, Executive Director of the CZ.NIC Association.